Dubuc’s position as CEO of A&E would be difficult to sustain, since she had already been engaged in extensive — and eventually public — conversations with Amazon about running its studio business.

Dubuc is already well acquainted with Vice: She pushed for the deal that turned one of A&E’s low-rated cable channels into Viceland, Vice’s low-rated cable channel. That deal also put her on the Vice board.

Dubuc spent a lot of professional capital on that deal. And Viceland has not been a success. (Dubuc will argue otherwise (see below), but she’s in a very small minority.) Now she’s basically doubling down on that bet. The upside is that she can be the woman who shaped up Vice. The downside …

The big question marks for Vice, Dubuc and Smith: How much of the company’s success is dependent on Smith’s presence, leadership and uncanny sales skills? How much of that will he contribute to the company when he’s no longer CEO, no matter what role he morphs into? It will be fascinating to watch.

Speaking of watching: Dubuc appeared onstage at our Code Media conference last month and answered several questions about Vice. At the 25-ish minute mark, you can see her commentary about Vice’s “bro-y” culture; at 33:25, she has an extended defense of Viceland’s performance. Short version: “We’re 24 months old — what do people want? Give us a shot here.”

OnePlus’ phones are a great value, but they’ve each individually had a few drawbacks. One negative they all had in common, though, was a DRM deficiency. None of the company’s handsets supported the correct DRM level required for HD playback in Netflix. Distress on the subject came to a head late last year, and OnePlus surprisingly announced that it would add the feature in the future. In a comment on OnePlus’ forums today the company confirmed that it was now able to update handsets to support it, but the process will require that you send the phone back to OnePlus for the update.

The deficiency stems from OnePlus’ failure to perform the steps required to reach the L1 security level in Google’s Widevine DRM, which is required by Netflix for HD playback.

When Apple unveils iOS 12 five months from now, you shouldn’t expect too many major new features. Instead, Apple has shifted focus to improving the overall stability and user experience of the mobile operating system, postponing bigger changes to next year.

That doesn’t mean iOS 12 will be boring, but the update likely won’t be anywhere near as exciting as its predecessor or next year’s big release, iOS 13.

The news comes from Axios, which learned that Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi announced the revised plan to employees at a meeting earlier this month.

Apple reportedly postponed various features including “a refresh of the home screen and in-car user interfaces, improvements to core apps like mail and updates to the picture-taking, photo editing, and sharing experiences.”

iOS 12 will have a number of new features focused on augmented reality, digital health, and parental controls. Apple is also “prioritizing work to make iPhones more responsive and less prone to cause customer support issues,” whatever that means.

Axios points out that some engineers inside the team are questioning Apple’s decision, and whether or not it’ll actually lead to better quality. Apple’s software has received plenty of criticism over the past year. On top of that, Apple has had to deal with various security issues over the past few months, as well as the unexpected revelation that it was secretly slowing down older iPhones to prevent unwanted shutdowns.

iOS 12 will be released this fall alongside new iPhone hardware. The report doesn’t provide any details about Apple’s 2018 iPhones, however.

Apple is the only PC or smartphone vendor to have full control over the user experience it provides to its customers, thanks to its positioning as an integrated platform vendor. This is a key–often overlooked–advantage for the company that is driving customer satisfaction and trust as well as attracting serious attention from the enterprise at a time when Google’s Android is doing neither one.AppleInsider – Frontpage News

Even if you’ve never heard of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), you’ve probably already come across them several times online without realizing it — and you might have even been put off by one of its minor annoyances. The AMP project was created by Google in 2016 as yet another initiative to make online browsing faster and more responsive. Put simply, it works by making an educated guess on which pages a user is likely to visit next and begin preloading them before they do — for example, by preloading the first Google Search links in the background.

Taking a different tack, another class action lawsuit — following Apple’s admission that it slows down iPhones with weakened batteries — charges that the company made the change to avoid the full cost of fixing defects.AppleInsider – Frontpage News

We never expected the outrage over the design of a hamburger emoji to bubble up to the point where Google’s CEO had to personally intervene, but such is 2017. And today, our long cheese-on-bun global nightmare comes to an end with the public release of Android Oreo 8.1, which fixes the unappetizing glyph.

Android 8.1 also adds a new beer emoji, which no longer sees frothing foam inexplicably remain at the top of the mug after half the beer has been downed.

Here’s what the offending emoji looked like in 8.0:

Would you go to a joint like this? No.

Here are the much-improved new characters in 8.1:

Google’s new burger emoji now follows Microsoft’s approach of patty-cheese-tomato-lettuce. This is far more…

Earlier today, Twitter users discovered that searching for the term “bisexual” in photos, videos, or news yielded no results, while other search terms, such as “homosexual,” “gay,” or “lesbian did. While the company has reported that it is working to quickly resolve the issue, it’s been criticized for appearing to censor the term.

While a regular search would show the term, searching for it and other words like “sex,” “butt,” and “boobs,” under the photos, videos, and news section appeared to also have been eliminated. Activists are understandably upset about this: advocacy group The Bisexual Index told BBC Newsbeat that people who identify as bisexual have “historically been hypersexualised and associated with porn and promiscuity.”…

Hearthstone [Free] is famous for having some crazy card interactions, but it’s also infamous for having some of those interactions resolve in unpredictable ways, which often messes with player decisions and frustrates players (and might even affect the outcomes of matches). Players have been calling for these interaction issues to be fixed, and it looks like the developers are finally starting to remedy those issues. In a video today, Josh Durica, Hearthstone Gameplay Engineer, talked about some improvements coming to the game. The first rule change is in order for “after” triggers to activate, the card needs to be present for the original action. So, when a Wild Pyromancer is summoned by a spell, it won’t trigger because it wasn’t present at the beginning of the action.

There’s another rule change affects triggers again but this time in relation to the zones where triggers can happen. Before this, triggers happened in order: first the Battlefield, then the Hand, and then the Deck. So, now the game will look at all the zones at the same time and then trigger, but it will only trigger according to how the zones were before all the triggering starts happening. I know, it’s a bit confusing, but the video above clarifies it pretty well (around minute 4). These changes will be coming soon and should make the game more predictable. Predictability is much-needed in any card game because it can help players better plan plays without frustration. If you want to learn more about these changes as well as the technical side of the game, read this blog post.

If you find yourself slapped with a season ban on Overwatch even though you did nothing wrong, don't worry — it's a bug and Blizzard is on it. A rare Overwatch bug has affected around 200 accounts, eating up the skill ratings they earned and banning…Engadget RSS Feed